Carr's "It Doesn't Matter" (document en anglais)

Carr's "IT Doesn't Matter"

1. Synopsis

Nicholas Carr has created a lot discussion in the IT scholarly field with nearly 400 articles citing his article "IT Doesn't Matter" published in Harvard Business Review in May 2003 (Google Scholar, 2007). The main thrust of his article is that organizations should treat information technology (IT) as a commodity in which it should attempt to keep costs to a minimum, minimize vulnerabilities, and avoid risk-taking. By comparing information technology to other commoditized industries like the railroads and electricity, Carr attempts to convince his audience of executive management and IT leaders that IT's role within an organization should not be treated much differently than any other cost it seeks to minimize. Carr believes that organizations should not attempt to build competitive advantage through IT investment because advantages built with it are short-lived as the innovation spreads through the industry and becomes commoditized.

2. Content Critique

As I mentioned in the previous section, Carr's audiences are executive managers and IT managers though the main thrust is very much towards executive managers. Carr's use of examples from the electrical and railroad industries demonstrates his position well. He posits that IT is an infrastructural technology rather than a proprietary technology. Proprietary technologies are the property of a single company and can be used to build competitive advantage. Infrastructural technologies are those that are often shared throughout an industry rather than used by a single company. He then uses multiple examples to demonstrate his position. Innovators and early adopters are able to get ahead of their competition but only for a time through the implementation of new infrastructural technologies. As a technology diffuses through the industry, it begins to lose its ability to create competitive advantage. This happened with the electrical and railroad industries, and the overinvestment in IT during the Internet bubble and bubble bursting parallels the same thing happening to the railroad industry in the 1860s.

Carr builds on his position for executives by describing how easy it is for IT to be commoditized. First is the fact that it is a "transport mechanism," specifically for data. Second is that it is "highly replicable" due to the ability to copy data very easily. The rise of the Internet accelerated this capability as it provided an easily delivery channel for the data. Lastly, IT is often experiences very rapid price deflation. While Carr uses Moore's Law (Wikipedia) to demonstrate his point, I do not believe it is an appropriate point. While the specific physical components of IT are subject to patterns such as Moore's Law, it is yet to be demonstrated that it applies to the software aspect of IT. Carr states that as cutting edge IT matures, it is soon available for everyone.

Having established his position, Carr continues with advice for companies on their IT investments going forward. There are three rules that he proposes for companies to use. The first is to spend less on IT, the second is to be a follower rather than a leader in IT, and to focus on the vulnerabilities of not implementing an IT investment rather than the opportunities created. It is in his conclusions that I feel are the weakness of Carr's case. While I agree with the majority of his findings in the rest of his article, I think that the final portion falls short. For example, Carr states that companies should make vendors stop with constant requirements for upgrading systems in order to run the latest and greatest. The difficulty with this assertion is that the operating system that runs over 90% of the desktop computers in the world was created by a single company, Microsoft (Burger, 2002). Microsoft's monopoly is a powerful one because the vast majority of software is written to run on their operating system. That means it is not a position of power that a company has in trying to force Microsoft to stop creating newer versions of its Windows operating system that require more and more powerful hardware. Microsoft makes hundreds of millions of profit every year and can easily afford to lose even hundreds of companies as customers.

Carr also criticizes

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